Dante POV
One week.
Seven days of suffocating silence.
The house felt wrong. It was a cavern, the echoes of my own footsteps mocking me.
I kept smelling her. Lavender and rain—a phantom scent that clung to the air. I would turn a corner, expecting to see the cascade of her dark hair, the porcelain of her skin, the softness in her eyes before I broke her.
But it was always a shadow. Or a curtain sighing in the draft.
I wasn't sleeping. I drowned myself in scotch, consuming more in a week than I usually touched in a month.
Elena tried. God, did she try. She started wearing her hair down, mimicking the way Sera used to style hers. She started making tea, but she always burned the leaves. It tasted like bitter ash against my tongue.
One night, the thunder woke me. Rain lashed against the windows like a whip.
I sat up, my heart hammering against my ribs. For a second, the alcohol and the storm conspired to trick me. I thought I was back in that night. The night I made her kneel.
I reached out to the other side of the bed.
"Sera?" I whispered, my voice raw. "Come inside. It's cold."
A hand touched my shoulder.
"I'm here, Dante."
I turned. I pulled her into my arms. I buried my face in her neck. "I'm sorry," I mumbled, the alcohol blurring my mind into a haze of desperate need. "I'm sorry about the rain."
She stiffened. Then she softened. "It's okay, baby. I'm here."
We collided in the dark. It was desperate, rough. I was trying to claw back something I had lost, trying to erase the image of Sera shivering in the mud by losing myself in the warmth of a body I prayed was hers.
When I woke up the next morning, the sun was blinding.
I looked at the woman sleeping beside me.
Blonde hair. Sharp features.
Elena.
Bile rose in my throat. I scrambled out of bed, recoiling as if burned, nearly tripping over the sheets.
"What are you doing here?" I snapped.
Elena sat up, pulling the sheet to her chest. She smiled, like a cat that had finally cornered the canary. "You needed me last night, Dante. You called for me."
"I didn't call for *you*," I said, my voice dropping to absolute zero. "Get out."
She didn't move. She looked at me with a strange intensity.
A month of dead ends later, she walked into my office. I was staring at a map of the city, obsessively marking possible locations where Sera could be hiding. The private investigators had found nothing. No flights. No trains. No credit card usage. It was as if she had simply ceased to exist.
"Dante," Elena said softly.
I didn't look up. "Not now."
"I'm pregnant."
The world stopped.
I slowly turned around. She was holding a test. Two pink lines.
I stared at it. I felt... nothing. No joy. No excitement. Just a hollow thud in my chest.
I thought about the baby I lost. Sera's baby. The one I killed with my pride.
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Yes," she beamed. "We're going to be a real family."
I looked at her stomach. It felt like a trap closing around my leg.
But then, a dark thought twisted in my mind.
If Sera hears about this... if she knows I'm having a child with another woman... she will come back. She will come back to scream at me. She will come back to fight.
Hatred is better than silence.
I walked over to Elena. I didn't hug her.
"Good," I said. "We'll announce it. Fireworks. A party. Make sure the whole damn city knows."
Elena's smile faltered for a second, sensing the coldness in my tone, but she recovered. She had what she wanted.
I walked to the window. I looked out at the empty gate.
*Come home and fight me, Sera,* I thought. *Just come home.*
